European eighteenth-century thinkers were fascinated by what they took to be the astonishing modern creation of the largest possible human community, a kind of global society.  Many of them were also critical of the extensive violence, domination, exploitation, and injustice that cross-continental connections routinely enabled.  They were, in short, deeply ambivalent about global connections, and their theorizations about global affairs were often informed by such ambivalence.  I examine the manner in which an illuminating and influential subset of such thinkers—including Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Denis Diderot, Adam Smith, Ottobah Cugoano, and Immanuel Kant—engaged in a diagnosis of the pathologies of the nascent cosmopolitan community of their time and the potential for reform in the future.  Each of these thinkers, in his distinctive way, favoured a form of transcontinental relations that would balance local self-determination and autonomy with global aspirations of robust contact, exchange, and communication, and each one believed that this possibility in their time was routinely and tragically flouted primarily by European governments and chartered companies.
 

Sankar Muthu is Associate Professor of Political Science. His research and teaching interests include Enlightenment political, social, and moral theories (including French, German, Scottish, and English writings of the 18th century) and their diverse historical and contemporary legacies; modern theories of international justice, political economy, commerce, sociability, communication, cultural pluralism, and cosmopolitanism; the modern intellectual history of conceptualizing and analyzing inhumanity and degradation; and historic debates about conquest, slavery, and just war. He has written about thinkers such as Rousseau, Diderot, Raynal, Adam Smith, Kant, and Herder. He has held fellowships from the Institute for Advanced Study, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Mellon Foundation, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. The author of Enlightenment Against Empire (Princeton University Press), he is also the editor of (and contributor to) Empire and Modern Political Thought (Cambridge University Press). He is currently writing a book (Global Connections in Enlightenment Thought, under contract to Princeton University Press) about Enlightenment-era philosophical analyses of emerging global connections (such as travel, trade, and exchange) and transcontinental institutions (including joint stock trading companies and networks of slavery and slave-produced goods).